OT-Which version of Linux is best?

Perhaps in a year or so when Ive got a better grasp on Linux.

Im looking for the Cessna 150 sort of linux, not the 737 version.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

I downloaded Damn Small Iinux yesterday..seems to run really well on my laptop. and this box.

I have that Compaq 350 flushed and blank, so I will do full installs on it as Im learning. Run from CD is ok but Im going to immerse myself in it. Hence Im looking for full distros. Having dial up sort of limits things a bit. Needing an external modem for most Linux has slowed me down a bit, but Ive managed to come up with some externals so now I can get into it.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

Ive noticed. Even in the responses here, there is little consensus.

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

There is a Firefox for Linux. Go here it's an 8.2MB tarball.

eh, KDE runs fine on my pII 400. I shut it down whenever I'm building large programs and restart it every week or so to clear it out, but I haven't noticed any big performance hits for normal day to day use.

Nate

Win95, of course.

You can still find copies of it for a buck at any Goodwill store and most fleamarkets. Hell, you can download it off most file sharing nets.

ral

Just a heads up. When downloading ISO files. Especially the big ones. Use the FTP sites and an FTP program if you are using a Windows box to get the files... It seems that downloading using HTTP lacks in error checking. YMMV

Thanks. I'll give that one a try and see what it's all about.

On Thu, 02 Jun 2005 10:07:33 +0000, Gunner wrote:

My 2 cents worth, I have a background in UNIX as I used an old Sun 100 (Sun's first computer) back in the early 80's. Been a long time ago and early Linux and GUI just did not cut it until recently. So I had Windows like everybody else. I forgot allot and had to relearn stuff. Over the last year I have converted most of my old hardware over to Linux. Which one is best? Well that depends on what you want to do. What I have found... Mandrake at least up through 9.2 is pretty user friendly and installs well. Great for a work station, not so good for a net server. The GUI on Mandrake is a real pig though. Do not use it on old hardware as it will kill it. KDE is slow and even the cut down(Light) Gui's offered will bury an under 500mhz machine. For a home machine on old hardware my favorite is Slackware 9.1, It is a single CD distribution, and most of the basic stuff installs just fine. May have to tweek sound cards and such, but I have had no problem getting online and up and running with factory setup/nothing fancy. One thing Slackware does is it handles some of the internals just like freeBSD. A much simpler approach. Non of the other Linux distributions do that. It lacks those GUI interfaces for tweeking the system, you have to go in and use an editor to change system files, so that may drive you crasy at first. It will force you to understand what your machine is doing and how. But once you get it down you will not want it any other way.

Slackware 9.1 is very friendly to old boxes and even runs KDE on mine. Now my brother hosts web sites and has DNS servers and maintains his own boxes on the backbone of the net. He and all of that crowd use the Red Hat / Fedora that is supported by the Linux community instead of the commercial Red Hat Linux. That seems to be the one to use for internet servers unless you go to BSD which is also very popular and widely used.

I still have an old Win98 box I use for testing. And I plan to build one more Windows box using XP Pro as I have one critical application that is still not yet ported to Linux. It will be my last Win box though. As by the time that one is used up the port will be done. I plan on building a high performance Linux box here pretty soon. A multi disc using sata raid and 64 bit chips etc... Will either go to Slackware 10.xx or Fedora if that does not work out.

Good luck,

You know of a 'Linux' distro called "Win95"? Not too swooft are ya?

In Re: OT-Which version of Linux is best? on Fri, 03 Jun 2005

Accept a challenge, get the Chinese version. :-)

Joe, nano, and pico are all good editors, with basically no learning curve (unlike those two "other" editors). Any linux system will have at least one of them. Nano is a clone of pico, with some extra features.

Try mutt or pine for email-- some people prefer one, some prefer the other. In either case, you have to tweak the configuration files to get the most out of them. Both are free, but pine may have to be downloaded separately due to a restriction in the license. The pico editor is part of the pine distribution.

Look at tin or trn or slrn for newsgroups. These may be non-intuitive if you're used to a GUI newsreader, so read the man pages first. Again, you'll probably want to tweak the configuration files, but once you're set up you'll never look back.

Whatever you run, stuff as much RAM in the box as you can afford, it can make a big difference (excess RAM is used as disk cache).

I've run KDE on machines as slow as 350Mhz, but for email and newsgroups you don't really need a GUI. Some people even use lynx for web surfing (text-only browser).

Neat - wish I had kept my old DOS box and that 1200 baud modem. Gave the modem that had current loop and 1200 baud on it to a friend with a DEC. It was a DEC.

Rats. Martin

Have you gone to the modem companies sites for linix type drivers ? maybe the internal modems can be driven with custom from their site drivers.

Martin

Are you perhaps thinking of "vi"? I remember just enough of it to edit the configuration file on jove (my own favorite editor) (Jonathon's Own Version of Emacs -- a subset of emacs which is much less resource hungry -- though on my current systems, even emacs is fast enough, and does more.

Enjoy, DoN.

I might put together my own version of killer95. My tweaked out 95 simply flys like mad, And software is free. Shit, the computer stores everywhere throw out old software, usually the corperate releases, you wouldn't believe some of the software packages I had given to me by computer repair shops and such.

n.

I cold wail away with Vi but once I got EMACS - that was nice - periodic updates - I downloaded my first copy from JPL ftp site. A long time ago. I like the multiple window and verticle edit ability. Some neat stuff.

If someone needs the Vi basics - I have some UNIX book here and likely a general set of commands.

Martin

In my limited experience it's the "winmodem" type that makes the trouble.. apparently requires windows for its driver or somesuch hogwash..

John

Ouch!

I wonder if you are getting download errors? I always look for an "MD5" before downloading, so that I can verify the file after download.

Yes, D.S.L. is pretty good. It can be installed to hard disk also, and a command given to make it into an upgradable debian install. :)

One caution re. D.S.L., is that some/many of the programs are NOT from a debian package, so making it into real debian can be painful. I've never had any problems with Knoppix.

But Ubuntu is pretty. :)

sdb